


My Hands Dripped With Myrrh

by quamquam20



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beltane, Blood and Injury, Blow Jobs, Dendrophilia, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gardens & Gardening, Historical Inaccuracy, Hyperspermia, Immortality, Masochism, Masturbation in Bathroom, Monastic Sign Language, Monastic Silence, Monks, Nymphs & Dryads, Outdoor Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Religion, Religious Guilt, Sacrilege, Self-Flagellation, Self-Harm, Short Refractory Period, Tree Sex, Trees can't get pregnant, Vaginal Sex, spit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:33:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29043174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quamquam20/pseuds/quamquam20
Summary: If Kylo had known what would happen after he touched the monastery's yew tree on Beltane, he would've done it sooner.There are legends that it rests above a hidden subterranean spring, that its roots wrap around bones and siphon off miasmas. That it protects the monastery from fire or lightening.But those are useless musings, little more than repeated nonsense.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 49
Kudos: 126





	My Hands Dripped With Myrrh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Denzer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denzer/gifts).



* * *

He notices it as he returns from Midafternoon Prayer.

The yew tree in the cloister garden is as much a part of the monastery as anything built of stone. Its twisted branches shade patches of mint and sweet woodruff, and Kylo has spent stolen hours sitting between its gnarled roots in solitary contemplation, listening to birdsong and the rustling breeze. His duties keep him close and though he is a recent arrival, his original priory absorbed by the growing abbey, he already knows the gardens well.

Perhaps that's why he's so sure the hole is new.

Yew trees, as a function of their unusual growth habits, have many knots and hollows, indentations and grooves. And this is not a drilled, perfect circle bored by a tool; it is a natural thing. An opening in the trunk, a gap in the bark.

It's the afternoon spring sun, no doubt. The slanted light throws even the dimpled surface of the monastery walls into relief, the slight gouges from a stonemason's chisel made evident, and eventually he is convinced that it is only his attention that has changed.

As the bells chime, Kylo fixes his gaze on the floor and hurries off to the scriptorium to take advantage of the final, deceptive hours of daylight.

* * *

Two days later, he is sweeping the paths that bisect the courtyard, whisking errant gravel back into place with practiced flicks. He ate quickly so he could return to work and, in the adjacent refectory, lingering eaters softly scrape at their wooden bowls of pottage in wordless silence. The fountain seems to trickle louder in the warm day.

Kylo bends to pluck weeds from the rain-dampened soil and drops a handful into the basket at his feet. Restharrow creeps along the ground, preparing to flower with soft pink petals in two months' time. He rakes his hands through the lanced leaves of heal-all while white lilies bob in the honeybee breeze. Roses clamber up the cloister arches, thorn-spiked stems covered in fragrant blooms.

But it's the cuckoo flowers that mark the season, and bluebells with their juicy stems, the tangle-rooted bistort, and the vulgar blooms of the lords-and-ladies. Soon to be a riot of color, the late April garden is already full of what's to come, fecund and nurtured.

Some say that the yew tree is far older than the abbey and, as Kylo eyes the furrows of the ancient trunk, banded like sinuous muscles, he believes it. Letting his mind wander is effortless beside it. He wonders if strings have ever made the wood sing, after it has been shaped into lutes that gather dust until stroking fingers ease them to wakefulness. If druids, long gone, ever searched for signs and portends amongst its branches.

There are legends that it rests above a hidden subterranean spring, that its roots wrap around bones and siphon off miasmas. That it protects the monastery from fire or lightening. But those are useless musings, little more than repeated nonsense.

He knows only that it can kill with an inevitability that's rare in the plant world. That it causes hearts to race and then stop, and livestock must be kept far from it.

But now that he's close, something else about it is undeniable: there, in the fatal trunk at hip height, facing the quietest corner of the courtyard, there really is a distinct hole. The dark void is suggestive enough that unbidden images of a lapping tongue and thrusting fingers flood his mind. With a shake of his head, Kylo wills himself to focus on the task at hand, taking refuge in the simple work of sweeping. But still the fevered thoughts come, phantoms of sullied gasps and ecstasy-arched backs.

And others forgive themselves for far worse, or else beg for mercy on their knees late into the night until daybreak brings relief. He has faster ways, though: stinging whips that leave marks, and metal chains or coarse ropes that bite and pinch and abrade beneath his undyed tunic. Although they're their own kind of pleasure and he sometimes wonders if he is truly punishing himself. He lies awake, touching the raised welts and bruises until he’s sure nothing has been sanctified.

* * *

The scriptorium is filled with the constant scratch of hardened quills on vellum, interrupted only when someone prepares pigments or resharpens their quill tip with a deft knife.

Distracted, he lets vines snake up his margins and wrap around his gilded initiums. Trees, heavy with fruit, erupt from the bottom edges of his pages. If anyone notices the sudden motif, they must dismiss it as the natural inspiration of spring. No reasonable person would ever guess that something far more physical spurs him on.

They are permitted to take breaks to rest their eyes, encouraged to walk the cloister and find restoration among green things. But as Kylo slides from his seat and pads noiselessly away, he has no intention of staying in the garden.

* * *

Even within the precinct walls, the road to the infirmary is choked with trotting horses and plodding, groaning carts stacked with barrels. As he heads east, the fields are a hive of activity, the hooks of scythes glinting in the sun with each swing before leveling swoops of unruly grass. Hands and metal blades churn the rich earth to remove unending, tenacious weeds. The orchards are flush with blossoms, cowbells clank from the pastures, and the sprawling herb garden smells like a jumble of every memory of childhood summers before he was sent away.

The lime-washed walls of the infirmary are blackened with soot above the fireplace. Brother Enric is instructing a group of novices, reminding them to strain the comfrey oil for salves through two layers of cloth because the last batch was unacceptably gritty and he won’t tolerate another like it. They pay no mind to Kylo rummaging through the small sealed ceramic jars of herbs on a shelf. The yew berries are dried and diligently powdered after their toxic seeds have been removed, and he twists out the jar’s cork and shakes a few thimblefuls of the reddish-brown dust into his leather pouch.

His return to the cloister is far more hurried than his exit. Slipping through the corridor by the dormitory cells, music echoes from the church with the start-and-stop of practice and silent corrections. Everyone is occupied and he hopes that any look of anticipation he may have appears more like diligent focus than pulse-quickening lust.

Kylo allows himself a quick peek at the tree as he passes by, but the feeling of having stolen something from it is too great and only increases his urgency.

The necessarium is empty, its row of seats divided by timber partitions. He may only have a few minutes, but with such a potent need thrumming through him, that will be more than enough. The windowless stall on the far end has an illicit reputation, so he picks the one next to it to reduce suspicion if he's interrupted. But the corridor is abandoned and the hewn floorboards will creak in warning if anybody should approach.

As he fumbles with the pouch, he thinks of women. Of their uncovered hair and bare legs. And he tells himself that that's why his cock is straining already, even as he brings the bag to his nose and breathes deep. Past the oiled leather is a syrupy scent, concentrated by drying. He grips his cock with punishing roughness and after a few strokes, he's dipping his fingers into the silky powder to rub it on the glistening tip. He checks over his shoulder — because somehow _this_ is the wicked part — and pushes his cock into the pouch, warmed by his hand. He doesn't think of women now. He thinks of the split in the yew, inviting and raw and forbidden, and he barely gets his cock out in time.

And when he comes, it hits the stone wall behind the seat with audible force. He used to count the spurts, to collect and measure his spend in a cup pilfered from the kitchen, to calculate how many times it took before the issue dwindled in volume. But he gave up long ago. More than nine jetting pulses streak each time, he produces an alarming amount, and it takes at least three rounds in quick succession before the output diminishes at all.

Self-denial has no effect and abstaining from meat to curtail his bestial urges does less than nothing. Discussing it with anyone at the infirmary is out of the question, because it's not something he should know about himself.

He keeps a handkerchief tucked into his sleeve or threaded through his belt, but the basket of clean rags beside him is more practical.

Hastily, he dabs at the flowing wall and returns to work before his absence is noted, the pouch hanging securely from his belt.

* * *

He's not normal. Kylo has known that for a while.

Without release, a torturous ache will spread from his balls to his abdomen in a few short days. A well-placed brush of his tunic has set him off on more than one occasion, leaving him biting back groans as he hunches over a manuscript, grateful that the dark color of his scapular hides the drenched patch until he can sneak away to change.

Alone in his cell that night, he manages it as he always has: with a keen whip. The braided leather falls are flexible from use and, as he combs his fingers through them, they feel cool despite the blazing heat they will bring to his skin.

And when he removes his woolen tunic, his cock is already leaking and painfully hard.

* * *

Spring rains have their own beauty, steady and fine, with a trace of the frost of winter. Drops splash from the ends of leaves and roll off his felted riding cloak as he ducks beneath dripping eaves, into the gloomy cover of the cloister. His duties for the day have been changed, the rain too incessant for pruning and grafting fruit trees, and he finds himself with time before Compline.

He should grab a book from the library to squint at in the low light — some novice's first attempt, the parchment thinned where they scratched off mistakes. Or mend the hole in his winter cowl, or write a letter to his parents and tell them of the constant improvements to the monastery, assuring them that his uncle, the abbot, is well and sends his greetings. The very last part is never true Luke wants to be left alone nearly as much as he does — but it seems to give them solace.

But instead of doing any of those things, anything useful or appropriate, Kylo ventures back out into the courtyard and, as he passes by the yew, snaps off the very end of a branch, pliant with new growth. It sprinkles him with rainwater and he clutches the feathery stems in his fist as he continues on to his cell.

* * *

The constant dusk of a rainy afternoon is enough to light the chamber, even through the tiny panes of rippling glass in his window. The fields beyond are reduced to brown and vibrant green smudges, the patter of rain ceaseless.

His damp cloak hangs from a peg beside the bolted door, and Kylo is unsure if he's shivering because he's naked in an unheated room or because of what he wants to do.

Against his fingertips, the flat needles are like soft scales, and he strokes along one stem, following the close-packed chevrons. The tips jab and poke, and that feels almost as good. Like it can fight back.

He sinks to his knees, his back to the simple cross hanging on the wall above his wooden storage chest. Sometimes he takes it down and wraps it in a clean cloth, careful to remember to replace it when he's done. The bare nail is less like a disapproving family member.

But he's only studying the moving place where the leaves meet him as he drags the sprig over his body, over the scars and scuffs. It catches slightly on the hair beneath his arms and when he gets to the thin trail that leads down from his navel, his cock pulses lazily. The stash of powder has been depleted, packed under his short nails to smell as he worked, regretting when he had to rinse his hands before eating. The rest of it he used to coat his cock every chance he got in the past days, mixing with his precome until it looked like his cock had been inside someone who said his name and pleaded for more. But dried, the yew felt distant and passive. Not like this, looted and still alive, and if that makes him terrible, then so be it.

He pinches off a single leaf and places it on the flat of his tongue. Like a consecrated host, he simply holds it there, letting saliva wet his mouth as he thinks about how the entire tree is balanced on his tongue like weightless poison.

Tipping his head down, he lets the spit flow freely onto the stone floor, the thread shining in the weak daylight. He curls his tongue to keep the needle, catches drips of falling moisture in his hand and strokes his cock, groaning at the aberrant thrill of it.

Because he thinks of spreading branches and tiny yellow flowers. Dappled sunshine and deep roots. Fresh red berries and how, if he could just rut against the bark, it might be enough. He thinks of the hole like a slit in the trunk and how he needs to push his cock into something besides his hand or rumpled bed linens. Needs to get his come somewhere new and leave it there.

He reaches for the sprig and the needles stab if he's not careful, but mostly they rub. They rub and the supple stem wraps around his cock and he can only bear to stop using it for long enough to come on it, releasing onto the bent leaves until they are drenched in his cupped hand. Kylo spits the leaf from the tip of his tongue and watches it sink into the opaque liquid while he catches his breath.

* * *

The final night of April arrives, balmy and tranquil as it envelops the countryside. All day, the abbey was filled with excited tittering, dropping to reluctant silence at the sight of a provost or dean before starting up again when the danger passed.

Even now, from his stall in the choir, Kylo can see grown men fidgeting like children made to wait for almond cakes. Beneath the deep hood of his cowl, he rolls his eyes. The fabric is still lightly scented by the lavender hedge he spreads it over to dry and that's as close as he'll get to bringing in the May.

They stand, letting their wide, knee-length sleeves fall, covering ink-stained hands to signal surrender and helplessness, and he settles into the rhythm of the prayer, so familiar that it's like breathing.

There are old names for the day, all profane, and the celebrations are just as heathen. Tomorrow, the conceited and gullible will bathe in morning dew for beauty. The villagers will gather flowers, arms full of woodbine and hawthorn, before they weave around a ribbon-wrapped maypole. Tonight they drive their herds between great bonfires, sure that the crackling mix of wood will bestow fertility and protection in summer pastures. A young May Queen will be chosen, rosy-cheeked from ale and dancing, her crown of flowers askew from her bouncing, and he's already sick of the way it will disrupt the abbey's peace until the others manage to drain their balls, either by design or neglect. He has no real objection to crowded debauchery or wildness, just no inclination to join in. After all, he came here to have a quiet life, free from the obligations of his high birth.

A censer swings on its chain, leaving puffs of frankincense smoke behind to hang in the still air.

And his voice joins the reverberating Magnificat, like a drop in a pure stream, and he can hear himself no longer.

* * *

After Vespers, Kylo lingers in cloister shadows as habit-clad forms filter out through the gatehouse in groups of two or three, the porter having abandoned his post in favor of carousing. They’ll all return tomorrow, with far lighter coin purses and unaccounted-for hours. In the distance, the party-clogged village rings with sounds of feasting and shrieking revelers. But here, where he stays behind, the serene garden is otherworldly in the silver light of the round moon. From a nearby forest edge, a nightjar calls with a constant low chirping trill.

Kylo wanders, head tipped back like he's mapping the night sky. And he can see the sparkle of Mars over the soaring, peaked roof of the church, but that's not why he's doing this. He takes a step nearer, leaving the path, his leather shoe sinking into the loam.

Nonsensically, it feels like flirtation — teasing closeness and coy, veiled want. He has enough shame to know that it's odd and embarrassing, but not enough to stop. If trees can be magnetic, this one is.

A narrow branch has been cut. Recently, if the dripping red sap is any indication.

It’s to be expected: a stolen bough for someone’s sacred fire. Yet he finds himself touching the hatchet marks like the edges of a laceration and hoping that the taken wood won’t light, that the green branch will snap and pop and steam instead of catching. It’s a spiteful curse, maybe, but it immediately sits well with him; the only remorse is for the damage done.

He should have kept a closer watch on such a day, and guiltily, he remembers his own recent theft and the wretched things he did with the prize. Penance can be a restoration, and Kylo vows to track the tree’s healing, to ensure that the injury seals properly.

And, since he’s here, he should look at the perforation in the trunk.

Surely this falls under botanical curiosity. He tends to plants, coppicing and pollarding and harvesting, propagating and shaping. If the largest tree in the courtyard has been damaged by insects or disease, he should determine the extent of it. That he’s suddenly aware of the dragging of cloth over his cock is coincidence. Checking the abandoned cloister first is motivated only by a desire for solitude. That it’s at night, that every one of his senses is whetted, that he has woken up from sticky dreams about doing this precise thing are all irrelevant.

This is a dispassionate examination.

Kylo draws his fingers around the rounded borders of the opening, the place where the trunk curls in on itself and disappears into unknown depths. The bark is healthy, adhering tightly to the underlying wood. Starlight shines on his hand's reverent caresses, on the callouses he’s gotten from holding rakes and quills and rope-handled buckets, from scrubbing floors and working in productive gardens. He has craved this so intensely that it now feels unreal, even as his intoxicated skin quaffs its fill.

He knows of women, has seen lifted skirts and parted legs, and the oval cleft he outlines is not so different in shape from what lies in misted recesses. There's even a thickening at the top, a nub of a knot, and if he's going to pretend, he should do it properly. He presses the pad of his thumb to it and sweeps over the textured bark, back and forth, imagining a sigh.

And it should have no effect on him. It should be some bawdy thing to grin at as he goes about his day, like the phallic outline scratched above the chapter house door. But he’s captivated.

Experimentally, and so slowly that it barely appears that his hand is moving at all, he eases his finger in, testing. At the depth of his first knuckle, the bark gives way to sapwood — flexible and damp, strong enough to become the perfect spring in longbows that fling arrows across battlefields. The fine grain should transform into heartwood, dense and dry, but as he works a second finger in, he instead finds a reservoir of thin sap.

Kylo has kept his distance with an outstretched arm, like the span of a limb will make this decent. Like not curling and plunging with his fingers means he’s not thinking about it. But there’s the siren song loophole, and the temptation of making his cock disappear into something with friction and weight. He stays in his head for endless days, denying his body like it’s a needy beggar that he gives to only grudgingly.

But this is an indulgent night, when others are in open-air brothels and overly generous taverns, and he’ll allow himself this. In this rare privacy, he studies the tiny armor plates of bark like a lover’s embroidered gown that he notices only because he wants what’s beneath it. He would be considerate in love, he thinks, but that’s not what this is. This is vandalism and ruin — a blissful, lone contamination.

It can be fast, Kylo tells himself as he draws closer. Incomplete. Just a hot-breathed breaching and he’ll rush back to his cell and finish the job, dripping with sap and want. It won’t take long, with his hardness already twitching. His thigh bumps the solid trunk, and he strokes the tree like it’s a horse that might shy away before he can mount it.

“Forgive me,” he whispers shakily against the bark and as ever, absolution feels like speaking into an empty chamber in spite of it all. So he gathers up the front of his tunic. Just a few pumps, he assures himself, enough to coat his cock in the watery resin. He can't risk more, even though the cloister is as quiet as a tomb and the village is full of drunken laughter and towering bonfires and he is so alone that he can hear his own pulse.

He wants to keep his fingers in, to feel them gliding beside his cock as he thrusts, but the tunnel is too narrow or his hand is too big, because even getting the head of his cock close makes it clear they won’t fit in together. If he could stretch the tree, feel the wood groan and creak under the strain, he would.

He swipes his cock across the opening, teasing only himself. The first contact is like fire-dried air, crackling and hot, and the hairs along his arms stand on end, as though the lightening the yew is supposed to discourage has instead been stored up to strike the ground nearby. Whatever patience he had evaporates at that first, inexcusable touch. The bark rasps his skin, but the deep insides of the tree are wet and alive and somehow yielding, and his legs shake as he pushes closer to cram every bit of himself inside as will fit. He wants to crawl in, and never again worry if he is too big or too much or too sudden.

His stockings have come untied and they slide loose down his calves as he thrusts. The promise to limit the sin, to dip his cock in and not release, is discarded like scraps because pushing into something like this is worth whatever wrath may come. The cavity that grips him has a pulling suction and a sound like mud on boots, and he's fucking it so hard that the front of his hips will bruise and his knees are scraped and his balls are tighter than a drumskin. Some low bough brushes across his back and he imagines a leg wrapped around him, holding him in. And when he comes, he rests his forehead on the yew's trunk and closes his eyes so he won't see his cock pulsing into the knot of the tree, despicable and unholy. Tainted and secret and unnatural, but he doesn't have to worry about where his come is going to go because the tree takes it all.

When he steps back and opens his eyes, there's not even a dribble from the hole. Like it never even happened, and he has found a perfect accomplice. He readjusts his belt, panting.

To his left, there's movement. Impossible, unearthly movement.

From within a spiraling unfurling hollow in the massive tree, a naked leg, lean and muscled, slips out. Something like a woman slides her freckled shoulder closer to him, as easily as shedding a cloak. Kylo tramples the woodruff as he stumbles back again, covering his eyes with a trembling, guilty hand.

 _Leannán_ _sídhe_. Faerie. Nightgoer. Witch. Nothing good.

If she saw what he just did…

 _Run,_ he wills his body. _Move._ But his feet feel like sandstone boulders and his legs are over-boiled and all he can do is watch.

To his abject horror, she emerges, lithe and milky in the full moon's light, and stretches like she just woke up from a particularly restorative nap. She ruffles her hand through her shoulder-length chestnut hair and yawns.

He thinks of more blasphemous names for what she might be, not because he believes in long-vanished goddesses, but only because she's inhuman and seems to stand outside of time in her strangeness.

Because she _is_ strange. And almost as confused as he is by the fact that they're blinking at each other in the night.

“Bit cramped in there,” she muses finally, the lilt oddly accented but unmistakably feminine.

And it's pure instinct. Kylo lurches forward and clamps his palm over her mouth, casting a wary eye about the abandoned cloister, scooping her closer to hide her nakedness in the generous folds of his habit. Considering that she just stepped out of an ancient tree, he'll give her the benefit of manners. Even if she can get him into enormous, freedom-ruining trouble if Luke finds out.

“My lady, silence. I beg of you.” His own voice, addressing someone after final prayers when it is forbidden to speak, sounds foreign and deep. He's coiled with fear, like she is a ball of pitch waiting to ignite.

Under his touch, she tenses but doesn't struggle, and when he tentatively peels his hand away from her soft mouth, she doesn't cry out. With puzzled fascination, she watches him hastily pull off his cowl and is cooperative, if a bit confused, when he pulls it over her head and adjusts the hem to cover her thighs.

Fear transforms into sharp focus, the absurdity of the situation forgotten in his sudden need to conceal contraband.

“Come with me,” he whispers. “I won't hurt you.” Even on a night like this, the circator, Armitage, will soon be prowling the corridors and dark communal rooms, eager to report any minor infraction to the abbot. Maybe especially on a night like this.

She scoffs at that, hand on her hip, and even underneath the cowl, the curves betray her sex. Kylo pulls the hood down over her forehead with more force than is perhaps necessary. From beneath the neatly stitched hem, she glares up at him and trepidation tingles along his limbs once again.

But he won't indulge it. Instead, he turns on his heel and starts toward his cell, certain that she will follow.

If she is to enchant him, she'll have to do it in private.

And, sure enough, the wool swishes and her unshod feet slap against the stone floor as she hurries to keep up with his long strides. His stockings flap with every step but he can't risk stopping to retie them. Up the day stairs that lead from the courtyard to the hallway lined with identical, sparse cells. He keeps the iron hinges on his door well-oiled and it swings open noiselessly. Only sliding the bolt lock into place makes a metallic scrape.

He can light the single candle on the small bedside table with his eyes closed, and in fact, he might as well be doing just that as he opens the tinderbox and snaps the fire steel against the flint to flick a shower of sparks onto the charcloth. As he lights the wick, he pretends he's alone so the sweat that's starting to trickle down his back doesn't become too obvious. Because he's in a thick-walled cell alone with a...

He glances over at her, wide-eyed in the glow of the candle as she inspects his hands.

… whatever she is.

She appears as a young woman, with a sharp nose and a stubborn chin, hair clean and uncombed as she pushes back the cowl's hood, and she's beautiful but there's a simmering impertinence that he wants to find the bounds of. She wriggles out of the cowl and drops it onto the floor like shackles she has escaped, and at least he knows she won't be swayed by offerings of clothing.

The woman is curious about everything in his room. The chamber itself, even. She touches the wall like she’s taken a pilgrimage to do it, then rocks back onto her heels to test the floor, as though she expects to discover a soft spot in it that gives way and sends her plummeting. In awe, she finds only solidness.

Her body is sublime, with the clarity of womanhood unaccustomed to the excesses of nobility or the rigors of fieldwork. She looks instead like she would be most at home with legs braced, drawing back a bowstring to anchor flat against her cheek before she looses an arrow to plunge into the heart of her prey. And she's staring at him like he's an impossibility.

“What enchantment is this?” he asks, fire steel still clutched in his hand on the slim chance that iron will ward off an attack.

“I could ask you the same.”

He won't be ensnared by riddles. The open window lets in sounds of far-off music, the uproarious pounding of drums slower than his heart. They are so alone here that he doesn't bother to shut it, and his rapidly forming plans are all variations of appeasing her. She must be here for something.

“What do you want?” Kylo looks around his cell as she tours it, calculating how much he can reasonably smuggle out of the kitchen cellar underneath his habit. “Ale? Cream?” His recollection of what offerings the fae accept is falling through the sieve of his mind and a smile curves her lips, making his blood run icy. “Bread?”

“I quite like what you've given me so far.” Her gaze sweeps over the length of his body and he won't acknowledge it. “I’ve been watching you, you know. Wanting you to notice.”

It should be terrifying and ominous, but she says it like she’s confiding in him. It’s a comfort, too, to at least know he wasn’t fucking an ordinary tree. But if his cell is to be a confessional, he will steer the conversation away from enticement.

Numbly, he sits on the edge of his bed, the straw mattress crunching against the wooden boards. He watches her move her body like it’s new. Or barely remembered. She wiggles her fingers, curls her toes.

“What are you?”

She stops. “You ask me what I am before I even give my name.”

This is utterly uncharted, and all he can do is blunder into more. She is steady, a dark wood that beckons.

“What is your name, then?”

“Rey.”

A false name, he thinks, to share it so freely with a stranger. Unless she feels that they are not strangers at all. “And what are you?”

He dreads the answer as much as he already knows it. Her tussled hair, the ripples of muscle along her abdomen. Her strong arms. And the delicate, unmistakable smell of the aqueous sap inside the immortal yew tree.

In answer, she inclines her head in the direction of the cloister garden. There's a kind of hesitation now, and she's measuring his reaction. He thinks of the Eucharist needle that rested on his tongue.

“You are part of it,” he ventures carefully. “And all of it.”

“You read too much poetry. But yes.”

Somehow this is the most terrifying thing she could be. No mirage or conjurer, and the yew is ancient and close. And deadly and full of his spend. Kylo groans and covers his face. “I've dishonored you.”

“Is that what you call it?” She runs her touch over her small breasts and he imagines how easily his own palms could hold the slight swell of them. And her fingers drift lower to work between her legs without a hint of shame.

Heat laps at his neck and face as he locks his eyes onto a crack in the floor. “My lady—”

“Rey,” she corrects, and there's a hitch of pleasure in her voice. Under his tunic, his cock stiffens, insatiable, and there is nothing stopping him from fucking her. If she has been sent to test him, he must not succumb. One fall doesn’t excuse a full descent.

“Rey, you have to stop.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees her withdraw her hand and, before he can congratulate himself on avoiding the temptation, the glistening wetness on her fingers catches the light and he desperately wants to know if it tastes like him or her. Or some luscious, iniquitous mix of them both.

“It feels better when you do it anyway,” she says.

Irritated, he gets to his feet and pushes his cock down as he paces. His traitorous body is merciless and demanding, even after. “Everything I did to you was wrong.” Kylo ignores her sound of annoyance.

“No, it wasn't.”

“Yes it was!” His raised voice fills the small chamber as he rounds on her. He doesn't know what he expected, but she doesn't even flinch. Just sets her jaw and narrows her eyes. The truth is that he has no real understanding of the creature he's just shouted at or what she's capable of. Kylo gulps. “Begging your pardon,” he finishes, “but it would be safer to just talk.”

Rey nods tersely, like she’s settling in for vexed silence, then seems to think better of it and softens. Her tense shoulders relax. “I wake up when I hear your voice. When you walk in the garden on bright mornings and read your books out loud.”

“To help me remember. We are encouraged to.”

“I like it.”

He wants to assuage her and this time, his pacing isn’t restless. She sounds like a song he heard once, from a bower’s unseen harp as he passed by, not knowing that the fleeting notes would remain locked in his memory. “Which do you like the most?”

She considers that for a moment. “The herbals,” she decides. “But the bestiaries are funnier.”

Kylo knows the drawings and descriptions are outlandish but, unlike the herbals full of common plants, the monks can hardly confirm what exotic animals are like, and the books end up being nothing more than secondhand fantasies and allegories.

“I enjoy the astronomical treatises too,” she adds, eyeing the ceiling. “Because I can see the sky. And I favor Cicero.”

The time is meant for scripture and daily devotional reading, but Kylo leaves those to the others. “I'll bear it in mind.”

Had he known someone was listening, he would have read more clearly. There will be a difference now: not muttering the fast words beneath his breath but letting them be a convergence, the place where he meets her in plain sight. He will speak to her as clouds roll past, as the smell of bread drifts from the kitchens, as autumn shortens his days. Kylo wonders at all the times she has watched him rushing by, late or hungry. Or the times when he carries sloshing buckets of water or pushes wheelbarrows.

And here she is, in his cell.

That he should be the one feeling exposed is absurd, but she wears the night air like a velvet gown and her brown eyes are lingering on the boundaries of his bare skin.

“Can I see all of you?” she whispers. “Please.”

He knows the longing that tugs from curious and needy places. He has it too. Right now. In the way that he aches to know if her body is as warm as it looks, if she’ll press it against him and let him grind into her hip until his knees buckle.

Because if he's discovered with a naked woman in his cell, the punishment will be swift. He won’t be spared if he insists they haven’t touched. And it won’t matter if he, too, is unclothed.

With the same garden recklessness, he removes his tunic and leaves it in a crumpled, forgotten pile. A new breeze drifting through the window prickles over him.

Carefully, Rey moves in and he has never been hunted but if it’s anything like this, it seems honest and sure.

Up close, he can dig into her beauty. The curl of her lashes casting fine shadows on her cheeks. The healthy flush beneath her unmarred skin.

Or nearly unmarked. A fresh wound slices across her upper arm, the bleeding only recently stopped. He circles it with a gentle caress, like he can make it disappear, and thinks of the stolen bough, crackling in some distant pagan fire, until the memory of his own theft again rises to the surface. Regret smudges his words, knowing that the first time he really touched her, it was to gain instead of give.

“Did it hurt when I took a cutting?”

“Just for a moment. And I see you're no stranger to that.” She strokes her fingers along a scourging scar on his shoulder and it feels like a balm. “What did you use it for?”

“To sin.”

“That means nothing to me.” The admonishment rests lightly in her mouth, and her head is tipped with curiosity. “Did you use it to hurt yourself?”

“No. That’s the penance, not the sin.” _Usually._

“Show me.” She splays her hand and, before his eyes, tender sprigs grow from her fingertips. But she is more interested in his body than hers, and when he takes her hand and retraces the same winding, tickling path, she licks her lips. When he wraps the stems around his cock, her hazel eyes are searching his. “Is this a sin?”

He thrusts into her touch. “Yes.”

“It doesn't feel like one.”

His swallow crackles in his ears, and he releases her hand. The yew sprigs tumble to the floor and her bare fingers are on him and somehow the ache is greater than before. She's moving slowly, carefully stroking over his skin and it should be so much that he can’t take it, but he only wants more. He wants to see where she drips, wants to get on top of her, espaliered, and push in and make her moan.

But if he spills like this, she'll be disgusted by him. She will see that he is too much, that even so soon after coming, he is a downpour on flooded fields, a catastrophe that climbs the banks. That he only takes, endlessly.

Kylo pulls back and she doesn’t give chase or seem confused.

She is simply patient, her expression soothing and kind.

“It’s a mess,” he explains. “I don’t think you want…”

_Want what?_

_Me. If she really knew._

But Rey hums at that, thoughtful.

“At the times when the brethren don't speak, they gesture,” she says.

He takes the change of subject in stride.

“We do.”

“What does this mean?” She grips her pinky with the other hand, wrapping and tugging. The kitchens and refectory are close to the garden, and she must see these signals often. Still, the movement is lewd when she does it and perhaps she hasn’t changed the topic after all.

“Milk.”

“And this?” She touches her fingertips to her tongue and he wonders if she can taste her own sweetness. He takes a step closer.

“Honey.”

She turns her hands, palms facing down, and lets them both drop at the wrists. Her gaze is steady and he thinks she knows.

He can hardly get the word out, throat thick with lust.

“Kneel.”

And slowly, she gets to her knees in front of him, the trap sprung, but he can’t decide who set it and who is caught. Because when he nods, her smile is an impossible, retrograde daybreak that makes him think of darkness and he gets closer still.

She seems too fragile to take him, her mouth too small, features too delicate. What they do is unnatural, an abomination that makes them no better than animals. But he can't look away from where her slick lips part and her pink tongue slides, and he flinches at the first hot lick. Because now she’s someone he can be inside of. He pushes in with a steady string of curses until he no longer remembers how to speak. Sucking, fuckable heat and he is suddenly certain that there is ichor in her veins and _this_ is the closest he can get to paradise without dissolving completely.

She licks his cock as though ambrosia flows from it, like he is a darkening sky after a long drought.

He could blame the day’s celebrations for thoughts of petals and nectar and this horrible need to fill her again. For once, he wishes he made more so he could pump it into her until they both sank to the silty bottom, dragged and undone. Because she uses her lips like he is the deliciousness that clings to a plum pit.

Kylo cups her chin, small in his palm, and she looks up at him. Above where she’s taking his cock far into her dripping mouth and he is lost; she knows and she wants it.

He could come on her face, get streaks of it in her hair, let it sting her eyes. Watch it slide down her chin, coating her skin like spilled wax. But what he really wants is to send it down her throat, to hold his cock in the wetness of her mouth and make her feel it all against her tongue.

It hits quickly, a gale and a surge. There’s the pressure and then the waves that don’t stop, that take hold and it has never been a brief surrender, but always a gulf draining.

It keeps going and her eyes widen in surprise. His cock is still pulsing at the back of her throat, in the growing pool of it. She makes a startled vibrating noise and, horribly, he brings his hand to the back of her head to keep her there. Because he wanted to do this: to astonish her and give her so much again that she’s not sure she can take it. But she doesn’t try to pull off, and her fingers dance between her thighs.

Something vicious in him wants to see it overflow from the corners of her mouth, too full to hold it all in. He wants her to cough and feel the burn of it in her nose even after she gulps it down and looks up at him again.

Finally, it ebbs and he is breathless when he pulls out.

In youthful fumblings, it’s never held for long. Spat out like bitter dredges. But she has kept him through this, and she is touching herself as her knees crush against the stone floor. And Rey opens her mouth like it’s an offering, all saltwater swirling and he strokes her cheek and lets himself feel like he did something good. Because when she swallows it and presses her greedy lips to the end of his cock like he is the last drizzle of wine from an overturned feast goblet, he thinks that maybe it’s good for more than messes.

She grins and taps her fingers again to her tongue as she rises.

_Honey._

He wants to be the air between her needles, the warmth that makes her flower. Settling for pulling her into an embrace, he wonders why he didn’t begin with this. Even before she stepped out of the tree, this would have felt like home, like she is the beating heart of the place where they stand. In his arms, she sighs contentedly.

However she is here, he’s grateful that she’s in no rush to leave. More desperately than he needed to hide her, he needs her to stay, like this. The rise and fall of her breathing, the little press of her toes onto the top of his foot, the late spring smell of her.

But all she ever does is stand, so Kylo walks them over to the bed and pulls her down to lie beside him. With his back against the wall, it’s narrow but he turns to face her and she has space to wriggle back and forth, straw rustling, making a nest for herself in the mattress. Running her nail over the sun-bleached linen weave, she studies a new world.

He finger-walks the hills of her, and the precinct walls could crumble and he would roam her still. The books could burn, precise letters smoldering to ash, and he would stay; the roof of the church could collapse, smashing the intricate windows and turning all to dust, and he would haunt the ruins. Because he’s bound to the lodestone of her, the nonsensical pull he feels. But he sees the sense in it now and there is nothing to fight.

“How far from the tree can you go?” he asks, tracing her collarbone fronds.

“Far.” She touches the bridge of his nose, amused. “Are you going to take me somewhere?”

He laughs. “Where would you like to go?”

“With you?” She pushes her thumb against his sharpest tooth. “Anywhere.”

She’s so close and Kylo wants to catch her ripe lip with his mouth. He’s leaning down to do it when he stops, remembering that she’s lethal on his tongue.

“I won’t hurt you,” Rey says. “I can be medicine to you now, if you want.”

“What kind of medicine?”

“The kind that keeps you as you are.”

She speaks nonsense, tempest-tossed and cool next to him. The battles that would be fought over such a thing, the gold that kings would give… “There is no medicine like that.”

In the face of all he doesn’t understand, she is feather soft but tide sure. “For you, there is.”

Her lips. More than anything, he wants to kiss what he just had, what just made him feel like there was no end. What’s making planet-tilting promises.

“You can kiss me. I said I won't hurt you.”

So he does. And her mouth tastes like fresh yew berries, mild and sweet and soft; if she’s lying and this kills him, he's not sure he minds. Tongue swimming, and her fingers aren’t like the tips of branches anymore. They are scions, waiting for the cleft and the stock, the binding and the sealing. She pulls at him until he’s sitting up, mouth moving hot and he wants to feel how she comes apart. Wants to use his eager body to do it, and he’s had releases tonight but he can give it to her this time.

As if she can hear him, Rey breaks the kiss and climbs into his lap like it's nothing at all. As though _this_ is the natural order of things — to straddle him and claim her place. He has half a mind to correct her, to tell her that she disregards the most basic laws of the earth, that she usurps, but she seats herself and the moment she begins to ease down onto his cock, he's only certain that he needs her to keep going. That he could be thrown from the Garden for this and never once regret it.

Kylo churns her against him, grinding hard, and her eyes are open, rippling pools in the flickering light. He has been here, too: what he left in her before is coating him, dripping down to cling and he doesn’t know how he fits in her, but he does.

“Use it,” he tells her, pushing into her indestructible strength. He has dreamed of offering this to someone who wants it and finds him unbroken, with humid breath against a neck, with his cock deep.

He recognizes the hip-snapping, July field sweating way she's moving on him. Can feel the untempered crescendo building in her body. That he can help her do this at all seems miraculous, that he can join with her and make her gasp and clutch at his back with bow-strong arms and wrap her legs like roots around him and hold him there and maybe he's been the bones beneath her all along. Maybe he's been here forever, too.

He locks his hands into her wind-tumbled hair, brings his teeth to her star-studded shoulder and she is in a night sky of her own, floating in the ether. Firmament and shattering cliffs and rolling sea storms. Because, somehow, when she is wet on him, almost silent in her bliss, she can be everything and he can hold her.

And when she is done, he doesn't know a poem for it. Not a single one.

But maybe she is writing her own as she smooths her hands all over him, like she has to push him back into his own form but she’s the one melting into the space between them. Slack and happy, and she is so earnest when she says it that there is no room for doubt.

“It’s good.”

He kisses her neck, her cheek, her forehead and thanks her with paintbrush-steady hands. Finally, she drops back down on her edge of the bed and smacks her lips, like she’s trying to remember the name of a feeling.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

“Just water.” It’s close to the mark.

The pitcher on the table is full of clean water and he pours her a cup. As she slurps it, they listen to drums and shouts and she bounces her leg in time, and Kylo wonders if it’s possible for anyone to be having a better night than him. Reclining, he watches her, his elbow braced to prop his head up as she sets down the empty cup and settles back in beside him.

She fingertip taps his chest. “ _Do_ you have everything you need?”

“What?”

“Cicero. You have a garden and a library.”

In answer, he threads his fingers between hers; she is essential, even if it's too soon to tell her that. “Do you think you can come back again?”

“Yes, now I can. But it’s safer if I only visit at night until they leave.”

He stops, thumb pressed to her knuckles where he was rubbing. “Leave?”

“One day.”

“Surely I must go with them.” A strange panic surges through him. A raid? A war? When?

Darkness passes over her face but she tries to hide it. “If you wish.”

“I don’t,” he clarifies. “But I took vows.”

“Then take new ones.”

When she says it, the spike of sacrilege doesn’t threaten to stab, but is content with being merely a graze. A welcome sting. He winds a strand of her wild hair around her ear.

“What vow would you have me make?”

“Stay with me. Protect me.” It’s simple.

He’s used to oaths that take something away. And they’re sworn in churches that make voices echo, instead of the muted linen closeness of his bed. And never to a woman with dewdrop eyes and zephyr breath. She is the only miracle he’s ever seen, and if anything has been preordained, it’s the way she feels beside him.

So he takes her hand, kisses the finger where a fede ring should go, and forgets the rest.

“Yes. I swear it.”

He should say other things, but there will be other nights for that. Nights when they have to whisper, so he can groan it into the nape of her neck or gasp it against the inside of her thigh.

Tonight, they talk until the candle winks out and the line of smoke twists. He asks about the things she has seen, she asks about the places he has been. About his family, his body, his food. She asks about books and music and wine. He asks about plants, about healing, about constellations. She wants to know what his mouth does. They touch and talk until the bells ring.

“Are you going?” she asks him.

If past celebrations are any indication, Matins will be an exercise in futility, the church empty except for a disappointed abbot and a groggy smattering of monks. And at dawn, anyone who staggers back from the village in time for Lauds will be bleary-eyed and swaying with drink. The useless chapter house meeting will consist of ten of the most disciplined monks waiting as Luke takes long, calming breaths.

“No, I think I'll stay.”

And their talking gets quieter, the pauses between longer until they both drift off, vined around each other. He dreams of tinctures and eclipses.

Kylo wakes before daybreak and wonders at the smoothness of her skin until the bells call him to Lauds. Before he goes, he searches for a tunic to lend her, digging past the securely tied sachet of lemon balm and rosemary that keeps moths at bay.

He tells her where to hide it, and he is sure that first light will end whatever euphoric spell he’s been under and this is madness.

But he kisses her anyway.

* * *

Armitage studies him with needlepoint focus, taking in his sure footing and clear eyes, before sitting back in his choir box, disappointed that he found no fault in the abbot’s nephew.

Mixed with the last whiffs of lavender, the hood of Kylo’s cowl now smells like her and he can think of nothing but the silk of her hair, cropped and dark, through his fingers.

When he returns to his cell, she's gone, the habit he lent her stuffed behind a hedge of sweet bay in the garden.

* * *

A thin, worn tunic and a hooded scapular are easy enough to find in the communal wardrobe of frayed cast-offs. Kylo folds them into a neat bundle and furtively tucks it into a crevice within the yew's trunk.

Perhaps he's imagining the encounter, a haze of May Day strangeness. A fading, impossible dream. Perhaps the tree will grow around the threadbare wool, sealing it away forever.

But when he reaches out to touch a branch, the leaves curl around his fingers. He smiles.

Because she will knock on his door in the dead of night and they will slip off into the forest to lie beside summertime streams. And, come winter, he will huddle with her beneath blankets and share his heat until she shudders and sighs. Spring will come again and again and again. And their lives, forever entwined, will stretch out in an unstoppable peace.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/DenzerWriter/status/1344323434784972801) by the incomparable [Denzer.](https://twitter.com/DenzerWriter)
> 
> This abbey is not a real place (but is inspired by one!) The bloom times on the plants are not all correct and that's not how yew is used medicinally. I played fast & loose with monastery layouts, blended traits of a number of monastic orders (including the convenient lack of braies), and ignored daily schedules whenever convenient, etc. You know how it is. I'm trying to add flavor, not a bibliography. But if you want to nerd out with me in the comments, please go for it!
> 
> Also, yew is unbelievably toxic. Every single part of it except for the flesh of the berry. Like chew-three-seeds-and-die toxic. Don't put your dick in it and do not put the leaves in your mouth while you jerk off.
> 
> And don't fuck dryads under a full moon on Beltane. Or do, I'm not your mom.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Want more smut and magic? Me too!  
> [Good Fences](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27026203/chapters/65978914) (E;13k two shot) Witch!Rey/Vampire!Ben modern AU
> 
> @quamquam20 | 18+


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